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D. S. Soper, F. Piepkorn: Halo Effect Contamination in Assessments of Web Interface Design 1
Halo Effect Contamination in
Assessments of Web Interface Design
Daniel S. Soper, Farnaz Piepkorn
Department of Information Systems & Decision Sciences, California State University, Fullerton 800 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton, California, USA, {dsoper, fpiepkorn}@fullerton.edu
ABSTRACT
This paper relies on findings and theory from both the human-computer interaction and cognitive psychology
literatures in order to inquire into the extent to which the halo effect contaminates web interface design
judged. These distortions and halo-induced delusions have substantial negative implications for rational decision-
making and the ability to objectively evaluate businesses, technologies, or other humans, and should hence be a
critical consideration for both managers and organizations alike. Here we inquire into the halo effect using a
states were activated using polarizing issues including abortion rights, immigration policy, and gun control laws.
Subjects were then asked to evaluate specific interface characteristics of six different types of websites, the textual
content of which either supported or contradicted their preexisting affective beliefs. Comparing subject responses
to objective control evaluations revealed strong evidence of halo effect contamination in assessments of web
interface design, particularly among men. In light of the results, a theoretical framework integrating elements
from cognitive and evolutionary psychology is proposed to explain the origins and purpose of the halo effect.
TYPE OF PAPER AND KEYWORDS
Regular research paper: halo effect, cognitive bias, user interface design, web design
1 INTRODUCTION
Although technical research remains an important part of the contemporary information systems (IS) research agenda, the IS research community has clearly expressed an increased interest in cognitive and behavioral phenomena over the past several decades [2,
4, 18, 26, 49, 69, 81, 89, 95, 99]. In accordance with this
general trend, IS researchers have conducted a large number of inquiries into human interactions with technology, including many studies in the areas of web design and usability [1, 25, 28, 33, 35, 52, 59, 68, 70,
88]. These two areas of inquiry are, of course, not
mutually exclusive, and in this paper we contribute to their integration by inquiring into the extent to which a particular cognitive bias known as the halo effect produces inaccuracies and systematic errors in judgment in the context of web interface design assessments. Almost everyone has experienced and is familiar with the halo effect. Like all cognitive biases, however, this familiarity exists primarily at an unconscious level. Put simply, the halo effect (or halo error) is the tendency general feelings or affect toward the entity [12, 92]. If,
Open Access
Open Journal of Information Systems (OJIS)
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2018
www.ronpub.com/ojis
ISSN 2198-9281
© 2018 by the authors; licensee RonPub, Lübeck, Germany. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions
of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Open Journal of Information Systems (OJIS), Volume 5, Issue 1, 2018 2 Figure 1. A theoretical representation of the halo effect for example, you hold a colleague in particularly high regard, then you would be likely to assign high ratings to her individual characteristics (e.g., intellect, trustworthiness, efficiency, cleanliness, manners, reliability, etc.), even if she may not objectively merit such high ratings. Although the halo effect clearly influences it has also been shown to distort the way in which we perceive businesses, educational institutions, government entities, consumer goods, and even certain technologies. The extent to which the halo effect colors assessments of interface design, however, is not currently well- understood. Given that websites now commonly serve as the most publicly visible face of an organization, this is not an insignificant or trivial oversight. On the contrary, the ability of managers to accurately critical implications for the way in which both customers and the public at large will perceive the organization itself. In an effort to reconcile this oversight, the current study employs a controlled, randomized experiment involving 42 web interface design variations and 1,230 research subjects in order to assess the extent to which halo error distorts evaluations of web interface design. The study described herein substantially extends and refines our preliminary work on the topic [87], and proposes a new theoretical framework to explain the origins and evolutionary purpose of the halo effect. Despite more than a century of research in other fields, the halo effect has with a few notable exceptions been largely ignored in IS research. The following section therefore seeks to familiarize IS researchers with the halo effect by providing a detailed overview of the history and development of halo effect theory. We then describe our research hypotheses and methodology, followed by a presentation of our analytical results and a discussion thereof. The manuscript concludes with a summary, limitations, and directions for future research.
2 THE HALO EFFECT
The halo effect is a c
affect toward an entity produces overtly positive or individual characteristics. An entity in this characterization may be a person, thing, location, or even a non-material concept such as an idea. As a cognitive bias, the halo effect is one of several known phenomena that lead to systematic errors in human judgment. Together, such errors cause us to behave very differently from what might otherwise be expected under a normative model of rational decision-making. From a theoretical perspective, the halo effect can be readily represented using a structural model, such as that depicted in Figure 1. As shown in the figure, the theory posits that the way s individual traits are perceived depends not only on the objective or normative value of toward the entity. The final assessment of a specific individual trait, then, is a function of the normative value preexisting attitude toward the entity, and random inter- judge variation, which may be explicable through substantive control variables. A positive (negative) broad impression can thus be expected to produce positively (negatively) biased estimates of individual traits. Inter-judge random variation notwithstanding, the magnitude of the halo effect can be quantified as the influenced by his or her overall affect toward the entity, after controlling for the normative value of that trait. Although the theory was originally described in the cognitive psychology literature in the context of one as since been extended into additional disciplines and realms of inquiry, notably for purposes of the current study including those of both business and technology.
2.1 History of the Halo Effect
It has now been more than a century since the halo effect first appeared in the scientific literature. In his 1907 manuscript on literary merit, psychologist Frederic Wells observed an unjustifiably strong correlation included qualities such as charm, imagination, and wholesomeness [98]. Wells could not possibly have D. S. Soper, F. Piepkorn: Halo Effect Contamination in Assessments of Web Interface Design 3 known at the time that this observation would inaugurate a stream of research that would endure for more than a century.
In accord with a common pattern in the history of
attention of the scientific community. In fact, more than a decade would pass before the halo effect would again be mentioned in the literature, this time by psychologist Edward Thorndike, who is generally credited with giving the halo effect its name [92]. Five years earlier, Thorndike had noticed that the ratings assigned to corporate employees for traits such as intelligence, reliability, and technical skill were, to a suspicious extent, very highly and evenly correlated. Quoting
Thorndike:
It consequently appeared probable that those giving the ratings were unable to analyze out these different aspects of the person's nature and achievement and rate each in independence of the others. Their ratings were apparently affected by a marked tendency to think of the person in general as rather good or rather inferior and to color the judgments of the qualities by this general feeling. (p. 25) Thorndike formally tested this supposition by evaluating ratings assigned to military officers by their superiors. As suspected, he discovered strong relationships among traits that should ostensibly have been nearly independent, an example being a correlation of 0.51 among officer intelligence and physique. He employer, teacher, or department head is unable to treat an individual as a compound of separate qualities and to assign a magnitude to each of these in independence of -29). As his ultima admonitio, Thorndike warned that all future scientific studies employing multi-attribute rating scales must account for the impact of the halo effect. It is somewhat disturbing to consider that the vast majority of such research studies published during the past century including those in the IS field have not heeded this admonition, hence casting an ominous shadow over the validity and accuracy of their findings.
2.2 The Halo Effect in Human Beings
Some of the most visible and widely disseminated findings in this area of research have emerged from nother person. In their highly cited paper, Dion et al. [29] demonstrated that physically attractive men and women were presumed to have more socially desirable personalities, a higher occupational status, more marital competence, and more social and professional happiness than persons of average or below average attractiveness. The boundaries of this phenomenon were later extended by Landy and Sigall [48], who found that assessments of writing quality were distorted by the attractiveness of the author. When asked to evaluate the quality of an essay along several dimensions, skilled judges who were shown a photo of an attractive woman and told that she was the author consistently rated the essay more favorably than judges who were shown a photo of an unattractive author. The ratings of judges who were not shown a photo fell between these two extremes. A later replication and extension of this work found that the halo effect was largely isolated to the condition in which male judges were evaluating an essay written by an author whom they believed to be female [43], thus revealing the gender of the rater and ratee to be a potentially important factor in halo effect research. This notion was confirmed by Lucker et al. [53], who found that the magnitude of the halo effect varied according to whether the judge was male or female, and whether the person being judged was male or female.
In addition to studies focusing on physical
characteristics, the halo effect has also been observed in traits by another. Early work by Remmers [75], for example, found strong evidence of the halo effect in being especially pronounced among university students. In a similar vein, students watching a video of a university instructor rated his accent, mannerisms, and appearance as appealing when he projected a warm and friendly persona, while the same traits were judged to be irritating and irksome when the instructor behaved in a cold and distant manner [65]. It has further been shown performance on the most widely used intelligence tests are strongly contaminated by the halo effect when the examiner is provided a priori with an overall assessment [83]. All of these judgmental errors and departures from rationality carry manifold implications for both science and society at large, and it is for this reason that several authors have investigated whether the halo effect can be mitigated through the use of training procedures. In a cross-sectional study involving nurses, for example, it was found that those nurses who were trained about the nature of the halo effect exhibited less pronounced distortions in judgment than their untrained counterparts [16]. This finding was later replicated in the context of managerial assessments of subordinates [14], and in [9]. Despite these findings, the utility of training in the mitigation of the halo effect appears to be neither universal nor permanent. In a replication of the aforementioned Nisbett and Wilson [65] persona study, for example, it was found that subjects remained highly Open Journal of Information Systems (OJIS), Volume 5, Issue 1, 2018 4 susceptible to the halo effect even after receiving training regarding its consequences [101]. Indeed, after evaluating nine different methods aimed at reducing the halo effect, Cooper [23] concluded that each left a residual illusory halo, while work by Bernardin [8] revealed that improvements in halo error subsequent to training disappear rapidly over time. Together, the studies reviewed above indicate that rful influence over assessments of their individual traits. These broad, overall impressions are formed from whatever information is available, be it years of personal experience, or, in the absence of all other information, something as simple as an impre physical characteristics. The halo effect clearly has a rationally judge the traits of others. It is a fundamental and deeply entrenched property of human cognition, and does not appear to be subject to permanent excision by any known means.
2.3 The Halo Effect in Business
A realization of the potential scope and scale of the negative consequences of the halo effect for business has engendered a strong and growing interest among business researchers, especially in recent decades. To date, the halo effect has been studied in a wide range of business contexts, including organizational reputation, management, investing, marketing, customer satisfaction, consumer research, and risk assessment. Some of the earliest business-related research into the halo effect was conducted in the area of management. When performing employment interviews, Bingham and Moore [13] interviewee traits were marred by halo effect contamination. Interestingly, the magnitude of the contamination was found to correlate with other factors, including the number of interviewers involved in the process. These empirical observations suggest that the halo effect is not insulated from the influence of other elements within the decision space, and that considering substantive control variables with a view toward isolating the halo effect is both prudent and judicious. The halo effect has further been studied in the colleagues, and subordinates [31]. Using a moderation model, these researchers found the halo effect to be responsible for more than 10% of the variance in contamination in the managerial domain was noted by Grove and Kerr [34] in their study of employee morale. When compared to a control group of employees from a financially sound firm, a group of employees from a firm in receivership reported very low values on a multi-item scale designed to measure job satisfaction. In accordance with halo effect theory, the distress felt by the employees of the bankrupt firm produced low ratings not only for dimensions such as job security, but also for other dimensions such as salary and working conditions both of which were objectively superior to those of the employees in the financially sound firm. It is important to note that the distorted perceptions of a firm caused by the halo effect can be positive as well. Kauffman and Wang [44], for example, concluded that many of the positive assessments and subsequent investments made into individual e-commerce companies during the DotCom bubble were tainted by halo error arising from the positive overall impression of e-commerce during that era.
In addition to management and investment
decisions, halo error has also been troubling in the field of marketing. In a study of viewer attitudes toward television shows, for example, Beckwith and Lehmann [6] found that the multi-attribute measurement models commonly used in marketing are strongly confounded by the halo effect. These authors warn that directly measured beliefs for different attributes of a product or overall affect toward that product or service. A laterquotesdbs_dbs17.pdfusesText_23
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